The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything

by Fred Sanders

The word economy can be an awkward one to use because in contemporary English it has come to sound like a word about money and markets. When we hear about economics, we think of the social science that studies the distribution of goods and services in human societies. An economy would be what an economist studies. But the word economy is much older than the (relatively young) science of economics. It comes from an ancient Greek compound word, oikonomos, made up of the words oikos (house) and nomos (law). An economy is the law that provides for orderly management of a household. The sense of the word may be better brought out by recalling the term “home economics,” which makes explicit the reference to a home and suggests that the home economist is paying close attention to how all business is conducted for the good of the household. The word economy contains the far-reaching idea of the orderly arrangement of a shared life, which is a much broader concept than the modern science of money.